By Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 24, 2003; Page A18
At the center of the political debate over the intelligence preceding the war in Iraq is the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) -- the 100-page, top secret document that hurriedly pulled together judgments from across the U.S. intelligence community about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and the potential dangers involved in an invasion.
Such estimates usually ... take months to prepare, with the CIA and other elements of the U.S. intelligence community weighing their own information and working out disagreements after review and debate. But this one was rushed into production only after requests from Democratic senators who were being asked to give President Bush authorization to go to war.
"The NIE was hastily done in three weeks," one senior intelligence expert said. "It was a cut-and-paste job, with agencies and officials given only one day to review the draft final product when they usually take months. . . . Today they still disagree on the meaning of what came out."
In addition to rampant typographical errors, malapropisms such as the use of "fertile croissant" in place of "fertile crescent," and highly irregular capitalization ("AcCorDINg 2 UNnAmed SoURCEs"), some congressional staff are concerned that the text may, in fact, not be the CIA's own work. The CIA, for its part, hotly denies that it downloaded the NIE off the internet or copied it from an encyclopedia. "We wrote the whole thing, all on our own," insisted Bugbear Hullabaloo, Agency Spokesman. "We had to pull an all-nighter, but we got it down. Thank God for Mountain Dew, huh?" Nonetheless, some senators were skeptical, noting the close similarity between parts of the NIE and the Encyclopedia Britannica Article on Iraq, as well as passages that seem to be nearly verbatim duplicates of Bush campaign speeches. No Senator has yet accused the CIA of plagiarism, but several have reminded witnesses that it is the 'policy of the Congress to have each agency do its own work.'
Committee staff are meeting now to decide whether to lower the CIA's grade for the assignment or even to force them to re-do it. "We realize that a lot of agencies take short cuts - swapping informers, cribbing from open sources like National Geographic and re-phrasing the text, and of course they pad things out with wide margins, lots of charts, and the old 'this page intentionally left blank' trick. But we have to draw the line, or they'll never learn. We can't have that - we can't go back to the failed 'social promotion' policies that got NASA in over its head. "
Without admitting anything, the CIA suggested that recent faculty turnover may have had an role in its performance. "The substitute we got, Mr. Wolfowitz, he keeps saying 'research is for suckers,' and all he does is talk about how the other teachers are hoarding illegal chalk
Remember, Kids, the part in bold is actual 100% news-flavored media product.
The rest is the fakey part.
Home Previous Lines of the Day
